“Of course, ma’am. As registered at the Ring on departure, there’s a party of preachers and lower-order acolytes from the Vicariate Astral, a full pontifex in charge, appropriate religious supplies for purification and benediction masses. And a dozen Sisters Hospitaller with a respectable load of medicae supplies. Exactly the sort of mercy-mission you’d expect in the circumstances. If the reports of what they flew through to get here are a tenth correct then I’d be wanting to hear some hymns and smell some incense at the end of it too.”
“Is that all?”
“One here that I don’t recognise. A Sister Palatine of the Sororitas. Sister Elouera Krovedd. Order of the Eternal Gate. Don’t recognise them as a Hospitaller order. And not Militant, either, not on Hydraphur.”
“The Eternal Gate. Hmm.” Calpurnia sorted through her memory for a moment until it hit her. “One of the Orders Pronatus. They’re a minor order, or a minor range of orders. Their responsibility is tracking down and obtaining relics and sacred items to bring back into the Ecclesiarchy’s care. I knew I recognised—”
Umry was ahead of her: Calpurnia saw the expression on the other woman’s face a moment before she caught up with her own words and realised their import.
“Damn it,” said Shira Calpurnia as she motioned Umry to pick up a data-slate and began giving out a new set of orders.
Rogue Trader craft Callyac’s Promise,
Low docking orbit over Galata,
Hydraphur system
“This gets worse and bloody worse,” muttered Kyorg as they waited for D’Leste to show up. The others looked at him with barely-concealed contempt and said nothing.
“Well, don’t you agree? I mean, is this how it was meant to go? Am I the only one who realises there are going to be whole swarms of tikks tramping about here? What are we doing about this?”
He had meant the question for Trazelli, but it was Beyaha who answered.
“I suppose,” she said sweetly, “that we were rather trusting that our Master of Envoys was up to the job of meeting with this Arbitor Calpurnia and persuading her to rethink this ridiculous idea. Wasn’t that foolish of us? Trusting you to be up to doing your job, that is, Kyorg.”
Kyorg flushed. He had never had any illusions about what the rest of the flotilla masters thought of him, but there was an etiquette to what one did and did not say. A line had just been crossed. He made sure his expression betrayed nothing and ran his fingers over the heavy rings on both his hands. It wouldn’t be long now.
Then portals from the docking bays rumbled open and the first of the Arbites stepped over the high threshold. The floor of the reception deck was beautiful polished bronze, the walls gold leaf, the ceiling overhead great sheets of softly lit amber, and all inlaid with wire-fine lines of jet to form a line-drawing of the view from the High Mese at Bosporian Hive, facing toward the Cathedral. It did not usually fail to make an impression, but the arbitrators paid no attention.
“Who presides here?” demanded one of them, with a pistol and silver trim to his uniform, as D’Leste came hurrying from the stairs that led up to the primary deck. Like all of them, he was in full and formal garb: an ornate grey and white tunic that fell to his thighs, soft black boots and frock-coat with silver braid in which threads of scarlet, denoting him a physician, caught the light. Like all of them, he wore a tapered black hood-cap decorated with chitin-quills from a Vassilian spark-glider and a rosette with the Phrax emblem.
“No one of us presides, respected arbitor,” said Gait, pointedly ignoring the apothecary’s entrance. “We are the masters of the bureaux and offices within the flotilla, operating in a caretaker capacity for the voyage back to Hydraphur. We meet and welcome you aboard in that capacity.” He bowed, as did they all.
The head arbitrator thought about this for a moment, then muttered into a vox-pickup and more Arbites poured into the Callyac’s Promise like black beetles. Kyorg winced at the way their hard boots scuffed the finish of the deck. To the flotilla masters, used to even their lowest menial being uniformed and decorated with fastidious care, the Arbites were underdressed to the point of being comical in their simple carapace and flakcloth and their impassive mirror-visored helmets. The smell that came through from their ship was metallic and sharp, the smell of armour and efficiently-filtered air, coarse after the delicate perfumes circulating through the Callyac’s Promise.
“Is this necessary?” That was Gait again, making a second small bow. “My recollection of previous inheritances is limited, but I do not recall an Arbites presence on our own craft on previous occasions. When the late and mourned Master Hoyyon succeeded the charter, we carried the charter down to the very surface of Hydraphur ourselves.”
“Special circumstances,” said the arbiter curtly. Eye coverings had never been in fashion aboard the flotilla, and it was disorienting to Gait to hold a conversation with someone whose eyes he could not see. Attempts to interfere with the succession are at a level without recent precedent and Arbitor Senioris Calpurnia has ordered an Arbites watch on each claimant’s ship for the duration. “Notify your crew.”
“The crew in this matter fall under the fiat of my colleague, Madame Behaya,” Gait replied coolly, and Behaya took a step backwards and closed her eyes. A loose silk scarf was wrapped around her neck but Kyorg could see her throat working as she subvocalised into the microbead in her neck. A second whisper from another direction confused him until he realised it was D’Leste trying to attract his attention.
“It’s all under control,” he muttered to Kyorg under the tramp and clank of boots as the Arbites began spreading out through the deck and the ship.
“I’m sorry?”
“All handled. I knew I’d find a way to balance out the advantage.”
“D’Leste, what exactly are you trying to talk about here?” Kyorg looked over his shoulder: Zanti, Halpander and Trazelli were walking over to them as well. D’Leste gestured to them and the little group shuffled out of the way of the flow of grim arbitrators.
“Dyobann!” said D’Leste in an urgent, pleased murmur. “Whatever happened to the old freak, I don’t think that doctored blood sample he took on ahead did very much to help us. There was another sample due from Varro, of course, but the warp storms helped us there. It got delayed and I don’t think—”
“It got delayed and it’s not necessary anyway,” snapped Zanti. “Because the Mechanicus got something stuck up them in the last few days and brought the shutters down. No blood-printing, barely any of the tissue-printing we were bracing ourselves for, for us or the heir. Dyobann’s scam may not have done the trick, but I think that he somehow got things so stirred up down there that he’s done just as well.”
“But anyway,” put in Kyorg, delighted by the apothecary’s crestfallen expression, “what was this thing you had taken care of, D’Leste?”
“I used some connections from your resources, Kyorg.” D’Leste answered, returning the sally. Kyorg tried to make it look as if he had known that D’Leste had been giving orders to his people. “It wasn’t too hard to find out when the ship that was carrying the blood ahead of Varro came in and where it docked. It flew right in and disembarked at the Ring itself, I don’t know who had the contacts to pull that off, but we should have the same ones.” D’Leste’s voice was picking up as he got excited again. “Kyorg’s office had all sorts of contacts and getting an agent who could move around the Ring was no trouble.”
“I think we get your drift, D’Leste. You took care of things.” Trazelli gave a meaningful tilt of the head to the Arbites swarming around the rest of the room. None seemed to have heard them, but D’Leste saw the point and moderated his voice.
“All I wanted to pass on was that I made sure that a particular possibility, presenting a possible if minor threat, has now been closed off. I shall so inform Gait and Behaya when they have finished conversing with the, uh, commander over there.”
“Here’s a better idea,” said Zanti. “You go back to the heir’s bed and make
damn sure that he manages to stay alive until the hearing. All this dosing-off of possibilities is no good to us if our claimant’s dead by the time we walk in there.” D’Leste, chastened, touched his cap and hurried away again.
“What happens if he dies?” Kyorg had assumed that even if Petronas wasn’t going to recover from the treatments, at least he would still be around to contest the hearing.
“Then we improvise.” Trazelli told him. “As far as we can tell, Varro’s built up quite a syndicate of his own, too much of a power base for us to housetrain him. We may have to bring him in anyway by force, and break that power base somehow. Zanti and I both have plans for that. Maybe you’d like to consider whether you have any capacity to assist.”
“Of course, colleague,” said Kyorg, bowing and ignoring the open insult. “Everything depends on having the successful heir in the right hands. I shall, as a matter of fact, pursue the possibility this instant.”
He walked away, his mind revving and whirring, barely noticing the squads of arbitrators filling the halls and decks of the Promise. He didn’t have much time. It wouldn’t be long until the hearing, not long at all.
The dromon Omicron’s Dart,
En route to Calata, Hydraphur
It was not the arrival Varro Phrax had dreamed about.
He had fantasized about flying down to the Augustaeum in a richly-appointed shuttle, his wife on his arm and his son running ahead of them as they walked through the Adeptus Quarter, admiring the minarets of the Monocrat’s palace and the great spire of the Cathedral. They would stand before the Arbites the way his father had done, the way one of the giant paintings in his manse on Gunarvo showed: Hoyyon Phrax standing in a ray of gold light that lanced down through a high window, head back and noble profile tilted into the light, one hand on the crystal dome beneath which the book of the charter lay open.
The reality never stood a chance. He looked around him now at the long, narrow passenger hall of the dromon that the Adeptus Ministorum had sent out to collect them. Only four metres wide and two levels high, the walls opened into regular flights of steps up to the outer galleries, from which windows looked into the passenger deck in turn. The furnishings were mainly benches along the walls—it was more like an alley between buildings than a room on board a spaceship. There was still a residual taint of incense in the recycled air, left over from the clergymen and Sisters who had filled the ship on the way out.
Their presence had seemed like a true blessing at first, a mercy mission. There were plenty of systems where mission-ships circled the outer reaches ready with healing and spiritual strength for crews coming in from bad warp-passages, and Varro had been delighted to find one here.
He had been surprised but not alarmed when the fat priest had come aboard and addressed him by name, but he had felt a chill when a sharp-eyed, shaven-headed Sister Palatine had followed him and he saw the pistol bolstered under the shoulder of her purple-black robe, its grip and barrel matching the gunmetal grey of the aquila at her throat and the chain of office around her waist. He had not led his wife and child into the court on Hydraphur: “Do your duty, my husband, I am proud of you,” Ksana had said, and Dreyder had hugged him, and then the Sisters had escorted him away.
Now he sat despondently at one end of the compartment with Rikah next to hint. Further down was Domasa, silent and hunched over: the start of this trip was the first time he had seen her truly afraid. The Sororitas and their grim reputation toward mutants, Navigators or no, had her pulling her cowl over her head and her sleeves down until barely any of her was visible under the black and russet cloth. She looked almost as though she were praying; more likely, Varro thought, she was regretting having left Cherrick back aboard the Gann-Luctis.
“Domasa,” Varro hissed, to no answer. He moved closer. “Domasa!”
The cowl slowly turned toward him.
“Shut up, Varro, I’m thinking.”
“What about?”
“About a way we can manage this situation, you little pissbrain. I can’t believe that the issue hasn’t arisen before, and it must have been dealt with because the charter is still in circulation, but I don’t know enough history to know, so I have to improvise. If you don’t have anything useful to add you have my cordial permission to leave me the hell alone.” Varro had heard no news about Yimora but he had seen Domasa recover from the warp-voyage with terrifying speed, and this was a Domasa Dorel he barely recognised. Not the courtly and obliging woman who had come to him on Gunarvo, and not the sick and exhausted woman of the voyage. This, he supposed, was the Domasa Dorel that had lived underneath those two, all steel and poison.
“The Ministorum, you mean? I remember my father carrying relics for them once, when I was very young. We flew into a war zone in the Ophidian Sector where the sanctioned traders couldn’t go and brought stones from some old shrine back to Avignor to be made into altars. That’s all I know of.”
“And they didn’t try to snatch it then, at least not in any way obvious to a toddler. So there probably won’t have been any clashes recent enough for a decent precedent.” Domasa was talking half to him in the way one might use a child or a pet as a token listener while they sifted ideas. “Alright then. If they were really confident about the charter they wouldn’t have come for us, they would just have taken it. If they’re here with us it means they think they need us. And that means we can make them negotiate. And if they’ll negotiate…” Domasa took a deep and satisfied breath, “then they won’t know what hit them. At least until we’re safely away with the thing, methinks.” She glanced at Varro and shrugged, half to herself. “I’ll have to keep improvising, but that’s alright. Nothing about a bunch of pious little cloister-monkeys that I can’t handle. And I’ve had news that the stupid fake heir the flotilla crew are putting up may even keel over dead before long. They’re panicking, and that’s good. Just you, Varro, remember not to try anything on with them. You owe it to yourself to bear in mind where your wife and son are, and that Cherrick is there with them.”
“I know the situation,” Varro said softly, and backed away. He thought again of Ksana and Dreyder, and wished he could have left Rikah back aboard the Gann-Luctis. But Rikah was his aide and retainer, his close companion for the whole voyage, and leaving him behind would have been suspicious. And they could not afford suspicion, not now. After all, it would not be long now.
Adeptus Arbites precinct fortress
of Selena Secundus,
Galata, Hydraphur system
“Do we separate them, ma’am?” asked Odamo, slapping his gauntleted hands together. “We’ve got more than enough boots on deck to be able to face the Sisters Militant down. And this rock is tough enough to fend off anyone who comes after them, too, until we choose to give them up. Just let them try and stand over this place like they did with the tor.”
Odamo had been offended by that, Calpurnia knew, and had been looking for a way to bend the Ministorum’s nose by way of retaliation. And then—she smiled at this—there was the gravity. The fortress used deck-plates to boost the moon’s weak gravity, but they were still a little below Hydraphur gee. Odamo was finding it much easier to get about on his usually stiff augmetics, and it was making him feisty.
“He’s got a point,” said Umry, walking alongside. “Simova’s not stupid, and this Sister Krovedd won’t be either. They’ll be using the flight to try coat-tailing their way into the hearing, but if we know that that’s what they’re doing, as we do, then why should we allow it?”
Calpurnia did not answer for a moment, but touched her signet to the Arbites icon in the centre of the door in front of them and stepped through into the courtroom.
This was a smaller, plainer court than the great chambers in the Bastion Praetoris, there because every Arbites fortress was required to have a courtroom within it. Unlike the more grandiose chambers it was built for function, not pageantry and exalted spectacle. It suited Shira Calpurnia perfectly.
“I believe we will let them en
ter, and speak their case,” she said, walking out onto the high pulpit from which she would oversee the trial. She stood five metres above the courtroom, above walls of smooth black metal at seventy-five degrees to the floor—had she wanted to walk to the far side of the court from here she would practically have to rappel down first. “One heir will stand on each side of the centre-aisle, with whatever retinues they have brought, and Simova and his delegation central and further to the back.” She turned to face the others, whose rank did not allow them to stand in the pulpit: they peered in from the other side of the door.
“I didn’t think this could be the first time that the Ecclesiarchy would have made a grab for a relic as precious as this,” she said, “and I was right. Umry, it was you who made the report on the last documented fighting, wasn’t it?”
“Yes ma’am. The Ecclesiarchy tried to bail up the flotilla while it was in orbit over Mayinnoch about a century and a half ago, and had a confessor and a quasi-independent order of warriors called the Fraternal Order of the Aquila try and demand the charter. The Arbites garrison stopped that attempt in its tracks.”
“Because…?” Calpurnia asked.
“It took any number of years before a ruling was sealed—went up to the high precinct command for judgement. But the verdict was that while there’s a pretty damned complicated stew of law and tradition that allows the Ecclesiarchy a heavy hand in acquiring sacred objects, this particular sacred object contains express direction as to how it is to be disposed of and controlled. Express placement in the hands of temporal law and the Arbites takes precedence over its origins including it in the broad subset of things that mostly-implied law gives the Ecclesiarchy control over.” Odamo was nodding, Culann was blinking.
[Shira Calpurnia 02] - Legacy Page 20